Face to face meetings are a mainstay of the business world. Face to face meetings are particularly important to coordinate activities when a project team is dispersed across multiple geographic locations. While getting meeting participants together in one room is easy when all participants are located in the same office, this is difficult when some team members must travel. The value of face to face interaction is demonstrated by the cost and inconvenience of the extensive business travel that businesses incur to facilitate face to face meetings. On one hand, dispersed teams are becoming more common with the increasing globalization of business. On the other hand, air travel is being subjected to increased security procedures causing additional inconvenience and lost productivity for business travelers. Accordingly, alternatives to travel that can obtain similar benefits as face to face meetings are increasingly being sought.
Videoconferencing offers a convenient alternative to travel. While many different videoconferencing systems have been developed, videoconferencing has so far failed to make major inroads into replacing travel as a means for facilitating face to face meetings. Perhaps the greatest reason that videoconferences have not achieved hoped for benefits is that most systems do not provide a sense of actually being present in the same room as the other parties. Among various factors that inhibit the feeling of being present with the other parties is that meetings often start with a preliminary step of adjusting and cameras, displays, and other equipment in the videoconference room to provide acceptable quality images. Even so, image quality often varies widely between different sites as a result of differences in equipment types, equipment settings, and room environments. Multipoint videoconferences multiply these difficulties, as more cameras, displays, and transmission paths are involved, increasing the number of variables.
Variations in lighting, color, setting, camera positioning and the like between images from different videoconference sites provide continuous reminders to the participants that they are watching each other on a display and not actually communicating face to face. These variations are distractions that shift the attention of videoconference participants away from each other and towards the technology being used (and the limitations of that technology). The resulting quality of interaction is reduced, and becomes a poor substitute for being physically in each other's presence.